


The Empty Vessel

by sistercacao



Series: GW500 Ficlets [3]
Category: Gundam Wing
Genre: Angst, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-10-07
Updated: 2007-10-07
Packaged: 2019-03-07 03:10:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13425504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sistercacao/pseuds/sistercacao
Summary: Love is the ultimate double cross.





	The Empty Vessel

**Author's Note:**

> 500 words from Duo's perspective, set just after Heero self destructs. Some blink-and-you'll-miss-it 2+1.

Love is the cruelest thing in the whole damn world. They don’t tell you– when they shove your soul into this mortal host and push you screaming into the world against your own volition– they don’t tell you that the thing you will crave the most, as a naked, empty thing, will be the ultimate work of your downfall. That the thing you need most in life is the one thing you have to wean yourself off in order to live it. They don’t tell you that the one certainty of love is that it will be lost, and the losing will be the only thing, in the end, that makes the difference.

I have lost every thing I have ever loved– people, places, machines. I have lost myself.

Okay, that’s not entirely true. I do, at least, know what I am: I am a work of anthology, a collection of stories– never my own, only the volumes of life breathed into me by other people. An encyclopedia of the dead– I have no intrinsic value, no personal knowledge, I am just the vessel that bears the voice of the fallen.

I call myself a lot of things, but none of them are me. They’re more like mantras, the things I have to remember because no one else will. The things I bear witness to. I have more crosses to bear than I have limbs to nail to them.

If I were to let someone in, let them carry some of this weight, I wonder what would become of me. I think I would cease to exist. I think this baggage is all that defines me.

It sounds like love is something I’m scared of. Maybe I am. Love is the ultimate double-crosser, the sweetest lie. It promises the world to you in the smallest of gestures: a gentle smile, a graceful combing of fingers through dirty brown never-braided hair, a simple necklace, a black shirt, a small, warm body against mine, a sleeping soldier. Love promises you things and makes you wish for them forever, but they are always fleeting. A final rattling cough, a blood-soaked face, a demolished church, a ruined machine, a boy lying in a bloody heap with the self-destruction button still clutched in his hand. That’s the awesome climatic paradox of love. Love giveth, and Love taketh away.

And so I am left, the witness-bearer, the empty vessel, the encyclopedia of the tragic misfortune of those unlucky enough to have ever gotten near me. Another cross, another worn-out shirt, another braid, another name. Another life.

And love, love will never heal me, only destroy me– again and again only to rise anew, the most pathetic phoenix you ever saw.

You know what I want? My meaningful death, my perfect end?

I want to die and have no one, not _one_ single soul, name themselves after me.


End file.
